18 August, 2023

Welcome To Women Leading Tech

Few industries in history have exerted such control and influence over the lives of everyone on this planet in the same way that the tech industry has over the last 30 years.

The mass adoption of the mobile phone in the 90s brought an unprecedented level of interconnectedness to societies around the world. The dot com bubble made fortunes for some and left just as many clutching at straws in an effort to recoup lost gains and convince others that the internet would be as transformational as promised.

The BlackBerry (remember those?) changed the complexion of work forever. Suddenly, everyone was always available over email — for better and, more often, for worse. Then, the iPhone, while not the first touchscreen or even popular smartphone, served as a paradigm shift in how everyone interacts with the world around them.

Behind the scenes, advancements in networking and infrastructure brought on unprecedented speeds of communication and transactions, allowing people to work, play and interact quicker and more naturally. However, these also ushered in extra challenges around cybersecurity and privacy that have not — and perhaps never will be — solved.

But, while these changes were created by diverse teams of people from around the world, white American men fresh out of college with precious little grasp on how the world actually worked were tasked with and given the credit for bringing these new technologies to market.

While we have become better at identifying the invaluable contributions of women from around the world to our advancements in technology, there is still a long way to go.

Is the touted mixed martial arts fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, with the hubris, aggressive masculinity and toxicity surrounding it, the impression that we want to give our children of the tech industry? Likewise, is the relentless corporate libertarianism beloved by the likes of Peter Thiel the best way for technology to interact with the world around us? Are the satellite tech towns and rampant inequality brought to much of San Francisco through the inflated wages dolled out to engineers the way that we want our societies to become structured?

Women are still underrepresented in the tech industry, leading to a wealth of problems around accessibility, representation and understanding. Venture capital money, the lifeblood of the startups that bring innovation to the sector, is overwhelmingly given to male-founded startups that perpetuate the problems discussed above. All of these problems exist, to a greater or lesser degree, in Australia.

With Women Leading Tech, we are not proposing that we will solve these problems. Instead, we hope that by giving the invaluable women in the industry a platform to connect, share, network, meet, learn and engage we can help to make the industry work better for everyone, by shining the brightest possible light on the women that lead the tech industry now and will lead it in the years to come.

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